While the current state of the world on land may seem chaotic and unsettling, news from beneath the waves and across the oceans is often just as confronting. Whether we are talking about impacts to marine biodiversity due to sea temperature rise and related acidification, microplastics and pollutant contamination, or problems of overfishing, our planet’s waters and marine life have seen levels of harm parallel to what humans have inflicted on our land habitats. A recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, found that when ocean impacts are included in the costs of climate change, the total economic costs of harm double. And yet in spite of this economic rationale for protecting and sustaining our marine environments, for some the deep-sea beds across the world’s oceans have become the next new frontier for mining. For some, promoting the solution to climate change as the need to turn towards “green” energy transitions that favor electrification over carbon-based technologies, this “blue” mining frontier holds deep riches and resources that are urgently wanted. The existence of critical minerals on the seabed floor, including nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese, among others, has been known about since the 1870s. It was...

YouTube video by Andrew Jones

YouTube video by Cindy Blackman Santana